SOS: Convenient Husband Required / Winning a Groom in 10 Dates: SOS: Convenient Husband Required / Winning a Groom in 10 Dates

Since it was obvious that even when she was ninety Adam Wavell would have the same effect on her, with or without his trousers, she decided to forgo the pain and turned up the temperature.

Chapter Three

ADAM took a long, slow breath as the bathroom door closed behind him.

The rage hadn’t dimmed with time, but neither had the desire. Maybe it was all part of the same thing. He hadn’t been good enough for her then and, despite his success, she’d never missed an opportunity to make it clear that he never would be.

But she wasn’t immune. And, since a broken engagement, there had never been anyone else in her life. She hadn’t gone to university, never had a job, missing out on the irresponsible years when most of their contemporaries were obsessed with clothes, clubbing, falling in and out of love.

Instead, she’d stayed at home to run Coleridge House, exactly like some Edwardian miss, marking time until she was plucked off the shelf, at which point she would do pretty much the same thing for her husband. And, exactly like a good Edwardian girl, she’d abandoned a perfect-fit marriage without hesitation to take on the job of caring for her grandfather after his stroke. Old-fashioned. A century out of her time.

According to the receptionist who’d been raving about the garden design course, what May Coleridge needed was someone to take her in hand, help her lose a bit of weight and get a life before she spread into a prematurely middle-aged spinsterhood, with only her strays to keep her warm at night.

Clearly his receptionist had never seen her strip off her skirt and tights or she’d have realised that there was nothing middle-aged about her thighs, shapely calves or a pair of the prettiest ankles he’d ever had the pleasure of following up a flight of stairs.

But then he already knew all that.

Had been the first boy to ever see those lush curves, the kind that had gone out of fashion half a century ago, back before the days of Twiggy and the Swinging Sixties.

But when he’d unbuttoned her shirt—the alternative had been relieving her of Nancie and he wasn’t about to do that; he’d wanted her to feel the baby clinging to her, needing her— he’d discovered that his memory had served him poorly as he was confronted with a cleavage that required no assistance from either silicon or a well engineered bra. It was the real thing. Full, firm, ripe, the genuine peaches and cream experience—the kind of peaches that would fill a man’s hand, skin as smooth and white as double cream—and his only thought had been how wrong his receptionist was about May.

She didn’t need to lose weight.

Not one gram.

May would happily have stayed under the shower until the warm water had washed away the entire ghastly morning. Since that was beyond the power of mere water, she contented herself with a squirt of lemon-scented shower gel and a quick sluice down to remove all traces of mud before wrapping herself in a towel.

But while, on the surface, her skin might be warmer, she was still shivering.

Shock would do that, even without the added problem of the Adam Wavell effect.

Breathlessness. A touch of dizziness whenever she saw him. Something she should have grown out of with her puppy fat. But the puppy fat had proved as stubbornly resistant as her pathetic crush on a boy who’d been so far out of her reach that he might as well have been in outer space. To be needed by him had once been the most secret desire shared only with her diary.

Be careful what you wish for, had been one of Robbie’s warnings from the time she was a little girl and she’d been right in that, as in everything.

Adam needed her now. ‘But only to take care of Saffy’s baby,’ she muttered, ramming home the point as she towelled herself dry before wrapping herself from head to toe in a towelling robe. She’d exposed enough flesh for one day.

She needn’t have worried. Adam had taken Nancie through to the sitting room and closed the door behind him. Clearly he’d seen more than enough of her flesh for one day.

Ignoring the lustrous dark autumn gold cord skirt she’d bought ages ago in a sale and never worn, she pulled on the scruffiest pair of jogging pants and sweatshirt that she owned. There was no point in trying to compete with the girls he dated these days. Lean, glossy thoroughbreds.

She had more in common with a Shetland pony. Small, overweight, a shaggy-maned clown.

What was truly pathetic was that, despite knowing all that, if circumstances had permitted, May knew she would have still succumbed to his smile. Taken care of Saffy’s adorable baby, grateful to have the chance to be that close to him, if only for a week or two while her mother was doing what came naturally. Being bad by most people’s standards, but actually having a life.

Nancie began to grizzle into his shoulder and Adam instinctively began to move, shushing her as he walked around May’s private sitting room, scarcely able to believe it had been so easy to breach the citadel.

He examined the pictures on her walls. Her books. Picked up a small leather-bound volume lying on a small table, as if she liked to keep it close to hand.

Shakespeare’s Sonnets. As he replaced it, something fluttered from between the pages. A rose petal that had been pressed between them. As he bent to pick it up, it crumbled to red dust between his fingers and for a moment he remembered a bunch of red roses that, in the middle of winter, had cost him a fortune. Every penny of which had to be earned labouring in the market before school.

He moved on to a group of silver-framed photographs. Her grandparents were there. Her mother on the day she’d graduated. He picked up one of May, five or six years old, holding a litter of kittens and, despite the nightmare morning he was having, the memories that being here had brought back into the sharpest focus, he found himself smiling.

She might have turned icy on him but she was still prepared to risk her neck for a kitten. And any pathetic creature in trouble would have got the same response, whether it was a drowning bird on the school roof—and they’d both been given the maximum punishment short of suspension for that little escapade—or a kitten up a tree.

Not that she was such an unlikely champion of the pitiful.

She’d been one of those short, overweight kids who were never going to be one of the cool group in her year at school. And the rest of them had been too afraid of being seen to be sucking up to the girl from the big house to make friends with her.

She really should have been at some expensive private school with her peers instead of being tossed into the melting pot of the local comprehensive. One of those schools where they wore expensive uniforms as if they were designer clothes. Spoke like princesses.

It wasn’t as if her family couldn’t afford it. But poor little May Coleridge’s brilliant mother—having had the benefit of everything her birth could bestow—had turned her back on her class and become a feminist firebrand who’d publicly deplored all such elitism and died of a fever after giving birth in some desperately inadequate hospital in the Third World with no father in evidence.

If her mother had lived, he thought, May might well have launched a counter-rebellion, demanding her right to a privileged education if only to declare her own independence of spirit; but how could she rebel against someone who’d died giving her life?

Like her mother, though, she’d held on to who she was, refusing to give an inch to peer pressure to slur the perfect vowels, drop the crisp consonants, hitch up her skirt and use her school tie as a belt. To seek anonymity in the conformity of the group. Because that would have been a betrayal, too. Of who she was.

It was what had first drawn him to her. His response to being different had been to keep his head down, hoping to avoid trouble and he’d admired, envied her quiet, obstinate courage. Her act first, think later response to any situation.

Pretty much what had got them into so much trouble in the first place.

Nancie, deciding that she required something a little more tangible than a ‘sh-shush’ and a jiggle, opened her tiny mouth to let out an amazingly loud wail. He replaced the photograph. Called May.

The water had stopped running a while ago and, when there was no reply, he tapped on the bedroom door.

‘Help!’

There was no response.

‘May?’ He opened the door a crack and then, since there wasn’t a howl of outrage, he pushed it wide.

The room, a snowy indulgence of pure femininity, had been something of a shock. For some reason he’d imagined that the walls of her bedroom would be plastered in posters of endangered animals. But the only picture was a watercolour of Coleridge House painted when it was still surrounded by acres of parkland. A reminder of who she was?

There should have been a sense of triumph at having made it this far into her inner sanctum. But looking at that picture made him feel like a trespasser.

May pushed open the door to her grandfather’s room.

She still thought of it as his room even though he’d long ago moved downstairs to the room she’d converted for him, determined that he should be as comfortable as possible. Die with dignity in his own home.

‘May?’

She jumped at the sound of Adam’s voice.

‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you, but Nancie is getting fractious.’

‘Maybe she needs changing. Or feeding.’ His only response was a helpless shrug. ‘Both happen on a regular basis, I understand,’ she said, turning to the wardrobe, hunting down one of her grandfather’s silk dressing gowns, holding it out to him. ‘You’d better put this on before you go and fetch your trousers.’ Then, as he took it from her, she realised her mistake. He couldn’t put it on while he was holding the baby.

Nancie came into her arms like a perfect fit. A soft, warm, gorgeous bundle of cuddle nestling against her shoulder. A slightly damp bundle of cuddle.